When the USS Arizona was bombed by the Japanese in Pearl Harbor, Tom Moon should've been on it.

Robin Conn/Huntsville TimesNavy veteran Tom Moon sorts through photos and clippings from his service on the U.S.S. Tuscaloosa during World War II.

Instead, he was on the USS Tuscaloosa, pretending he was a boxer for the entertainment of President Franklin Roosevelt.

Moon, a New Hope native who dropped out of school in the ninth grade to help his sharecropping father, joined the Navy in 1940. He was just 17.

After boot camp, he was assigned to the 600-foot-long Arizona, considered one of the greatest battleships in the fleet. But he and his buddy Chuck Colbin wanted to be on a faster ship.

They heard the president was going to be on the Tuscaloosa for a fishing trip, and the Navy was looking for volunteers who could wrestle or box for his entertainment. So, off they went.

Moon signed up for the wrestling gig but, at 110 pounds, "all the other wrestlers would've made two of me." He told the man in charge that no, he wasn't a wrestler, but he was a boxer.

He got paired against the best guy on the ship, and Moon made a pact with him: "Hit me once, not too hard, and I'll fall down."

But the day of the match, Moon's competitive side took over. The crowd was roaring for a good fight. And the president was watching. Moon had visions of actually impressing Roosevelt and getting to shake his hand.

So, he let go of what he thought was going to be a mighty right, with all 110 pounds behind it. He didn't make a dent in the real boxer, and the next thing Moon knew, he was waking up in the sick bay.

Still he wasn't on the Arizona, "which lies at the bottom of the bay at Pearl Harbor, and most of my classmates are still aboard."

The Tuscaloosa provided plenty of adventure for Moon. The cruiser got fired on, torpedoes were shot at it, it had to pick up survivors from sinking Merchant Marine ships, and it rammed a submarine.

And then, there was D-Day.

Moon remembers watching the paratroopers in the sky, vulnerable to German bullets and then to German soldiers once they landed. For hours, the crew of the Tuscaloosa, as well as myriad other American ships, fired at the enemy.

An almost minute-by-minute account of the battle shows that at 6:18 a.m., artillery hit the Tuscaloosa's flag, leaving a large hole in it. But the ship survived and it stayed 23 days off the shore of Normandy.

Even though the D-Day invasion was one of the greatest military feats of World War II, Moon wished it had gone differently.

"I don't know why they didn't let us fire for a couple more days before going ashore," he said. "There were a lot of guns on that beach that I believe we could've taken out."